Convicts and Cowboys

These photographs were taken at two maximum security prisons: McAlester, Oklahoma (OSP), predominantly white, and Angola, Louisiana (LSP), predominantly black, where ninety percent of the inmates are serving life sentences for murder.  These inmates are unable to take courses such as reading, and the High School Equivilancy (HSET) test.  The corrections department has denied such access to those inmates who are serving out life sentences.

The inmates have two things in common. They are serving life sentences for either aggravated rape, murder (s), and strong-armed robbery with no chance of parole, and they are cowboys, participating in their annual prison rodeos if their behavior is exemplary.  They receive better treatment and healthier food, and a choice of a McDonalds Combo Meal after the rodeo.

There are many reasons why the inmates chase after a two-thousand pound bull for “easy money” where the winner who grabs the one hundred dollars off the bull’s nose makes more money in that moment than all year at the prison wage of thirteen cents and hour.  Some men rodeo because “it’s like slamming crank, the adrenalin is so high it takes me hours to come down,” or “its controlled violence where the guards don’t get on my case.”  For other inmates, it’s a chance to break the monotony of prison life, to have an opportunity to show the civilians “that we are capable of having feelings too, that we can also be sad, sorry and remorseful.”

Regardless of their reasons, for that moment in time, amidst the lookout towers housed with sharpshooters, concrete walls, razor wire, and guard dogs, these convicts are men, free to become whatever they want or should have been.  “When I’m tied to a bull, and the gate opens, I see myself as a young man riding when I was free, I see my son…and then the dream is over.”

©1993 Steven Katzman